Quote from Bob Smith :

JeffR - if you want to be totally accurate, F1 cars weight about 440kg and the rest is ballast to meet the weight restrictions.

Yeah, if I remember correctly the miminum weight is with the driver in the car, about 600kg or about 1300 lbs.

In real life, rolling starts are only used for USA style racing, champ cars, IRL, and Nascar. The European forumla type races use standing starts.

NR2003 (Nascar Racing Season 2003) uses a pace car and the game handles it pretty well. Pole position gets black flagged (has to pit, costing about a lap) if it passes the pace car before green. 2nd place car has to stay behind pole position car until green. Passing inside a car in front of you on the same row before start / finish line also results in black flag.

It seems to work well, other than super speedway races where the draft keeps 30+ cars bunched up together until there's a wreck, you don't have the typical 1st corner crash fest so often seen with LFS. Probably because the races are a longer in NR2003, the drivers a bit more patient.

Regarding the cars spinning out, part of the issue is that the default setups have 1st gear set too low, resulting in a lot of tire spin. For example the FO8's first gear ratio is 2.5, when it should be about 1.5. In Lefty's setup for Blackwood in the FO8, he never drops below 3rd gear which is set at 1.35. 1.35 might be a bit too tall for a good launch, but 1.5 is low enough to allow some tire spin yet be controllable. I modified his setup so 1st gear was 1.5, and my 2nd gear was the same as his 3rd, and so on. I didn't use 6th gear (at Blackwood in LFS FO8, using just 4 gears is faster than trying to use all 6, with closer spaced ratios, an issue with the shift time and maybe the powerband of the engine).

The standard for NR2003 is that some servers don't allow any restarts at all. Other servers don't allow any restarts after 1 or 2 laps are completed, and limit the restarts to only 1 per race.

I think this would be a good example to follow.

Thanks for the link to the forum thread. It's nice to see that moderators here aren't as restrictive as those at RSC. I wasn't sure if it was OK to post a link to that mod. This seems to be a very good forum.

For the top "R" race cars and the FO8, the shift times should be much quicker, so as to emulate the real thing. For example, below is a link to a video of a BMW 320 E36 race car, similar to the "R" cars in LFS. Turn down the speakers as the rear end is really loud and whiny. I've read told that these cars use an Xtrack box, a very fast sequential shifter. Sequential shifter shift times are 30ms to 50ms, versus LFS's shift time, > 300ms (with auto lift off, with auto lift on, it seems even slower), 6 to 10 times as slow.

Because of the slow shifting and maybe an unrealistically wide power band on the race cars (even the FO8), running a setup where only 3 or 4 gears are used instead of all 6 is faster in LFS. It shouldn't be this way, since it isn't this way in real life.

Even if you don't agree with my idea on faster shift speeds, the video below is still impressive and worth the download. 4 classes running at the same time, and this very fast car is starting from the back of the pack because of a qualifying incident, so he gos through the pack very quickly.

You can find the on the link belowm click on the Rolf Van Os in een BMW ... E36 link here:

http://www.supercarchallenge.nl/videos.asp

Last edited by JeffR, Mon 22 Aug 2005, 06:57.

RSC removed the link to the mod, but you can do a web search via google for slicks for all cars and will find it as the first or second hit.

In my opinion, slicks for all cars, if server optional, would be a good thing for LFS. This allows players to compete on a non-slick tire server if they so choose.

The mod pretty much allows this (if the host has the slick tire mod, than other can join and use slicks online), but it would be nice to include it in the game.

Changing gearing and rear end differential locking rates is something rarely done on most street class racing, yet LFS allows this. On the other hand, most real racing with street cars is done with very sticky DOT tires which are only "technically" street legal, as they are not really intended for street use, or it is done with true slicks.

Rather than trying to draw a line as to which cars could have slicks, just let them all have slicks, but have a server option to disallow slicks, just as the servers can currently restrict which cars can run on a server.

What would be the harm of this scheme?

Quote from Nitemare :

have you ever driven a car, that weighs 600 kg and has 450 hp? i would think that it spins a lot

Not once it's up to speed and downforce is in effect. Downforce equals weight of the car at around 115mph. The FO8 needs a much taller gear than the default setting, so that 1st redlines somewhere around 80mph to 100mph. F1 cars are 850hp, 600kg, and set 1st gear to redline around 100mph.

With the default final drive, try setting 1st gear to about 1.5, 2nd to about 1.35, 3rd thru 5th as needed for the track. The shifts take too long and/or the powerband is too wide to make using all 6 gears faster.

I have a Hayabusa motorcycle, 175hp, 350kg (with me on it), 1st gear redlines at 81mph, and the bike still lifts the front wheel if it's at full throttle and you approach 45mph where the torque gets strong enough to do this.

Last edited by JeffR, Fri 12 Aug 2005, 12:34.

Champ cars rules impose a limit on boost and rpms (8500rpm), so in this case increasing the rpms does allow them more power, but not as instantaneously as a NOS button would. In the old days when they ran high speed ovals, the top 2 gears were very close, a few hundred rpm difference is all. The taller gear was used for most of the race to preserve the engine, the slightly lower gear for better speed. I don't know if this is done in IRL.

Someone at the old forum posted a video of a F3000 uphill event, but I can't find it. However here is a link to a video, showing a fast no-lift shift sequential shifter in a BMW 320 STW E36 race car. LFS should include similar shifters in it's race cars. The rear end is really loud and whiny, so turn down the sound.

http://www.supercarchallenge.nl/video/Assen-bmwSTW.wmv

Last edited by JeffR, Fri 12 Aug 2005, 11:56.